musical emotional processing on the basis of this study. Although pleasant/unpleasant
ratings correlated with activity in right parahippocampal gyrus, these dimensions did not
correlate with ratings of happy/sad. Thus, while this study appears to capture something
about the processing of musical valence, simply varying the amount of dissonance across a
musical phrase is not the equivalent to inducing happiness or sadness. Dissonance without
resolution likely corresponds more to irritation, which is a high-arousal negative emotion,
rather than sadness, which is a low-arousal negative emotion. Furthermore, there is evid-
ence for the cortical separation of consonance and dissonance from happiness and sadness.
IR, described above, is unable to discriminate consonance and dissonance although she can
discriminate happy from sad music.^50 In any case, this study suggests that musically
induced emotions are processed in brain regions overlapping those involved in general
emotional processing.
In a second study, Blood and Zatorre^51 explored intense positive emotional reactions to
music by having each subject choose an except that gave them ‘chills’, and listen to it while
PET responses were recorded. Compared to control conditions, the music induced
increased cerebral blood flow in the left ventral striatum, dorsomedial midbrain areas, and
paralimbic regions, areas that have been associated with euphoria, pleasant emotion, and
cocaine administration in other studies. In addition, music listening was associated with
decreases in blood flow to the amygdala, hippocampus, and ventral medial prefrontal cor-
tex, which is also consistent with the experience of intense emotions in other contexts. In
sum, these PET studies suggest that the experience of positive emotional responses to
music activate the same brain circuits as positive emotions induced in other contexts.
There are two related lines of EEG research on emotion that may shed light on how
musical emotion is processed in the brain. One line concerns the pattern of EEG activity
that is observed in anterior regions during the processing of emotion. For example, a num-
ber of EEG studies have found evidence that frontal activation patterns differ across emo-
tions.16,17,52,53A second line of research concerns the pattern of resting frontal EEG activity
recorded during baseline or neutral states and its relation to individual differences in affect-
ive style or personality. In the personality literature, current thinking is that different per-
sonality styles emerge from how emotions are regulated.16,17,52For example, depression is
thought to be characterized and maintained by an inability to experience positive affect;
shyness and anxiety are thought to be characterized by an inability to regulate fear; sociab-
ility and extraversion are thought to be characterized and maintained by the experience of
positive affect and the ability to control negative affect.
Interestingly, the pattern of resting frontal EEG activity has been shown to discriminate
these various profiles, suggesting that the resting frontal EEG metric is indexing the pre-
disposition to experience different affect states. This in turn suggests that the neural correl-
ates of transient emotion may be similar to those shown for different personality types.
One model has associated the intensity of emotion with overall amount of frontal
activation.54–56For example, infants separated from their mothers show an increase in frontal
activation.^57 A second model posits that emotions with positive valence, such as joy, interest, and
happiness, show greater left than right activation whereas those with negative valence, such
as fear, disgust, and sadness show greater right than left activation.16,17,52,54,58(It should also
be noted that Blood et al.^45 also found that the positively valenced consonance excerpts
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